Do adults have the skills they need to thrive in a changing world?
oecd.org
oecd.org
emotional control and social navigation
I've seen plenty of people be successful without being able to do algebra, while barely ever reading a book. I've never seen anyone reach great heights without being in control of their own feelings and understanding the feelings of others.
Of course it's hard to measure such nebulous skills, but we've all come across it in our day-to-day. We've all met that guy who seems to know exactly what to say in every situation.
These skills will continue to be valuable regardless of what the future holds.
I would add one related, arguably harder skill to master - pattern recognition. Being able to see patterns where others do not yet is an enormously valuable skill in life, and a key part of my arsenal for a changing world - I am, after all, an elder millennial, and I have watched the world go from smoking on the tube, bowler hats, typewriters and briefcases to… this - and I have anticipated and adapted.
I have found myself thinking a lot about this topic of late - I have a daughter, soon to be two, and I want to ensure that she is well equipped for whatever the world throws at her.
> I am, after all, an elder millennial
These things do not add up at all.
There’s a free and popular course by that name too.
I think that the only emotion you have to regulate in this mode is self-cringe, which ignorance helps to mask very naturally.
I think the text was meant to be read "If nothing else, and before anything else, be a good person to be around". Because that will open so many doors for you.
If no, I don’t understand this position then. Having social skills doesn’t magically create learning skills (unless we postulate that learning is social) or real world skills, I mean real world that doesn’t hear you out when you command.
At the very least it should be put together with reality changing skills, not first. Because in the first place it creates talking heads which only change perception temporarily (aka lying).
The basics of emotional control are things like not immediately interjecting when you disagree with someone in a conversation. But also, having some limits to procrastination, eg when you are studying. Or a bit of resilience when life treats you harshly.
Social navigation is understanding other people. Why is this person who arrived at the party alone looking down at the floor? What is a compliment that this person will appreciate? What do people here think, and where does it differ from what I think?
A friend of mine is insanely good at the social part, it's almost like magic. He saw a guy looking at him in a bar, goes over, says "hey man, you're a secret service agent, right?". He wasn't wrong, and he's friends with the guy now.
Now, back to persuasion. People who are actually good socially don't get caught bullshitting. The best people will acknowledge their faults. "I was thinking we could all do {this project}, but I'm not the techie here and you guys might have some input". People appreciate that over "trust me, we can totally do this guys, one team one dream".
It's actually the people who aren't good socially who seem to make progress initially, because at least they aren't anonymous, but they can't actually build the support they need and people start resenting their style.
I guess that’s where we see it differently.
Being able to master new skills is also a display of emotional control.
I think pretty much anybody can master the knowledge within a chemistry textbook, but few people have the skill to self study a chemistry textbook, part of which required emotional control.
Of course it's hard to measure such nebulous skills, but we've all come across it in our day-to-day. We've all met that guy who seems to know exactly what to say in every situation.
I do improvisational comedy. It involved some levels of emotional understanding and storytelling, but I am unsure how to translate it to real life. When you're doing improv, your scene partner is very interested in keeping a conversation going.
Absolutely, I found this a lot at university. For a lot of kids, especially ones at top unis, this is the first time they've ever done anything actually hard.
I mentioned this the other day. Before uni, I knew all the math and physics I'd ever come across. Like, everything. I twiddled my thumbs at the end of the IB exams. When I got to uni, there were entire question sheets that I didn't understand. As in "what does that lecture I went to have to do with these questions?"
It takes some emotional growth to deal with that situation, and the answer isn't external, in the sense of "hey you gotta ask the prof the right questions" or "the answer is in a particular book". The answer is that you have to really really concentrate hard and stick to it, even when it feels like you're not getting anywhere. (Examiners hate this one trick!)
Steve Jobs wasn't exactly known for being in control of his emotions. Musk, Gates, Ellison and Kalanick also have a reputation for exploding in rage from time to time.
When you look at history's greatest scientists or mathematicians you see a pretty similar picture. Newton? Erdos? Grothendieck? Diogenes? They weren't emotionally stable 9 to 5 guys. Quite the opposite.
People who reach great heights are rarely balanced people. "Everything in moderation" doesn't produce greatness. If history tells us anything it's that we are incredibly forgiving of the flaws of highly accomplished people.
I had spent years trying to work out why everyone was so especially unkind to me. I thought maybe I was autistic (I'm not), or that I was giving off weird social cues. Turns out that I just have trouble regulating the regular ups and downs of normal emotional life.
Often people talk about task-completion and procrastination when ADHD comes up. That's emotional disregulation too. You sit at a desk, open your algebra book and start working on problem one. As soon as it is slightly difficult the uncontrollable emotions run wild. It feels awful. Now scrolling a couple of youtube videos takes your mind of it. You get a little break from (what feels like) world ending emotional pain.
I still struggle with this years after my diagnosis but the first step to improvement is to label the emotions you are having, when you have them.
I agree. I think emotional control and social navigation are sort of, but not entirely related. My ADHD inspired emotional disregulation meant people often found me difficult to be around, the emotional swings made them uncomfortable.
I became happier and more successful when I started learning to be less toxic, to control my emotions, or at least not make it other peoples problem.
It is also possible that you met your fair share of assholes.
I think there are enough historical and present-day counterexamples to this, unfortunately.
with about one-third of workers in OECD countries being overqualified or underqualified for their positions, the misalignment has economic and social implications, particularly for overqualified individuals.
The question here is how to align educational actions with market demands. Skills alignment is only possible at a very granular level, and mass initiatives fail to meet this need. Companies lack the tools to understand people on a very deep level. This is my current obsession.
No amount of formal education can guarantee whether someone’s genuinely qualified to handle a certain position or not.
What are your thoughts on how we can help improve this alignment?
I've been talking to the entire market about skill management and I’ve noticed how flawed our methods for visualizing individual skillsets are. It’s impossible to consider upskilling and reskilling this way. When demand arises, the only possible solution is firing and hiring. This alignment will only occur when the demand provides a granular, specific, and clear indication of the skill gap.
I can’t imagine it would be good to have 1/5 of adults lacking in these skills even if it did align with some market demand, for example.
However, I don't think that stem is inherently less apt at creating citizens than humanities. For some things required today to be a decent citizen, a bit of stem knowledge is required, let alone if you want do dwelve into politics choices. Most engineers I know are pro nuclear. Amongst non engineers, this support is way less present. If I try to talk to someone about digital privacy, chances are nobody is gonna be interested about it except for a few stem people. And yet these are all things that are actual topics in the public discourse. Stem stem stem isn't inherently bad in itself. It's bad if you go stem stem stem and you think you are superior, but I don't think it's bad in itself. I think I've mad a bunch of different arguments and some might be a bit hard to understand, feel free to ask for clarifications
The irony of LLMs is that the sorts of modes of thinking taught by art and the humanities are going to be more valuable as we need to evaluate and work with AI and agents. Science and engineering will remain valuable too! But that isn't what's being questioned by these midwit business graduates we call leaders.
What is the question about Dante equivalent to "*Solve x+y=10, x-y=4." ?
https://artsintegration.com/what-is-steam-education-in-k-12-...
It's mind boggling that art was crammed in. Ruled by midwits.
Art students don't like it though.
One person’s NPC is another person’s thriving.
Yet, a healthy society is built on the majority of people being content with not being unique. Get a fulltime job, house, marry, have 2+ kids, pay your dues and mortgage, don't do crime, retire, ????, profit. For society anyway. But this boring generic middle-class all-american suburb lifestyle seems to be unreachable for millennials and younger nowadays because someone both pulled up the ladder and increased the barrier to entry to earn enough for a simple lifestyle like that.
But if you work three jobs, sleep in your car and simp on the internet, MAYBE a billionaire will take pity on you.
Collective bargaining and knowledge of labour history are definitely discouraged by design.
Can you define "basic" for each of these things? The introductory classes in my (computer science then software engineering) degree were all things I'd picked up from Osborne books before I hit puberty, is that standard sufficient for all the other fields?
Knowledge is forgotten when it is not used long term, and it is fine. But we need to acknowledge it and understand where to start getting it if a need arises.
Lol, not sure about this. I have two young children in private school and most of the kids come from wealth, like white collar/office professions, etc. My wife and I have the hardest time identifying with our fellow parents. They have zero hobbies outside of: social media, bringing their kids to breweries on Saturday, sports, Netflix, etc. Our single friends tend to be far more interesting with eclectic tastes.
At the same time you conflated having eclectic tase with being highly educated. I have really well educated friends who are burgers and beers and having not really sophisticated hobbies while doing really sophisticated jobs.
For the US it is here: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/survey-of-adults-skills...
Though the US is near average, man, that's really hiding some data there. Things that stood out to me:
In literacy, 28% of adults (OECD average: 26%) scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they have low literacy proficiency.
In numeracy, 34% of adults (OECD average: 25%) scored at or below Level 1 proficiency
In adaptive problem solving, 32% of adults (OECD average: 29%) scored at or below Level 1 proficiency.
In the United States, average results in 2022-23 went down compared to 2012/15 in literacy and numeracy
Again, these results are near the average. But still...? I wasn't expecting that ~1/4 or ~1/3 adults had these issues or that we were going in this direction. Yes, the reasons are flamewar-able, of course. Still, these data points are, to me, stark.
It would be nice if we could agree to stop, negotiate reasonably and relax (and grab those with noses too high and throw them into a deep pit). But it doesn’t seem to happen any soon. Attempts were made but turned out to be a really bad joke. Humans are too stupid for that to work.
Almost anyone with no skills except they can talk to people and arrange/organize deals is liable to make someone else rich, and might be well-off if they can figure out how to get a slice of the pie.
The big problem I see in society, fundamental flaw that's changed significantly in the last 30-40 years. Emotional regulation.
The real root cause problem is that there's a growing group of people(no available label, diverse group) who genuinely believe they are 'empaths' not like Vulcan level, but Betazed like. This group of people believe they are so good at emotions they can accurately sense other people's emotions. In reality, they are so emotionally dysregulated that other people's emotions overwhelm them.
My wife taught herself to read before starting school so she could understand what was going on in Charlie's Angels
It's caused a stir when Netflix dubbed some films into Finnish https://yle.fi/a/3-12275492
Yeah, except when we do, but it is too late then. Currently staying not in my home country and last year saw that "Everything Everywhere All At Once" was streaming. I immediately started it, only to discover that it was dubbed in the local language. So I got either local dub, or Chinese+local sub, nothing else. And my level of local language was like A1 or so. Thankfully a year later this issue has been solved, because it is not available for streaming at all today. Yay!.. :)
> In Poland, nine interviewers were identified as having a relatively large share of cases with unusual response patterns of respondents, using the same criteria that led to the identification of cases in the other countries. All data from these interviewers (774 cases in total) have been excluded from the data used to estimate the population model, which establishes the relationship between the variables from the background questionnaire and performance on the direct assessment to generate proficiency estimates (OECD, forthcoming[1]). This exclusion enhances the robustness of the model, by ensuring it is estimated based only on the cases considered to be of sufficient quality.
> Moreover, stronger evidence was collected that six of these interviewers in Poland breached data collection protocols throughout the survey. For instance, some of these interviewers were implausibly productive, conducting many interviews on a single day. Others did not record interviews or obtain respondents’ phone numbers, which made validation of interviews more difficult. Yet another interviewer was found to have falsified seven cases during data collection (cases which were immediately removed from the dataset as part of the quality-control process and are not included in the 774 cases under consideration in this note). Twenty-seven other cases collected from this interviewer were, however, validated and remained in the dataset. Since these factors raise concerns about the quality of all cases completed by these six interviewers, the responses to the cognitive assessment items for all cases of these six interviewers were excluded from the database (559 in total). Plausible values for these cases were then estimated using only their responses to the background questionnaire (for which no unusual patterns were detected) and the parameters estimated by the population model.
> In Poland, other cases with unusual response patterns that could suggest possible disengagement or lack of a reasonable level of effort during the assessment were identified. As these cases were not clustered within any particular interviewer, they were left in the dataset and treated as all other cases, given the difficulty of establishing objective criteria to determine whether reasonable effort was exerted, and whether the results of the assessment truly reflect the proficiency of respondents. While similar cases are present in all countries, the number of such cases in Poland can potentially have a significant impact on the estimated proficiency of the overall population. This should be kept in mind when interpreting Poland’s results. For this reason, in OECD (2024[3]) results for Poland are flagged with an asterisk.
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/survey-of-adult-skills-...
I think lots of the university educated ones (without professional skills), not really.
The tradespeople and dropouts that figured life out on their own, those ones have a better shot.
> However, on average across OECD countries, 18% of adults do not even have the most basic levels of proficiency in any of the domains.
This is painful but unsurprising.